The Opportunity Finder
Most buying mistakes are one of two: chasing a stock at its highs, or catching a falling knife because it looks cheap. The Finder is built to make both hard to do.
Its rule fits in a sentence: qualify on strength, buy on weakness. Decide which companies deserve to be bought while they're strong — then wait, sometimes for weeks, until one of them dips. Never the other way round.
Gate one: Qualified — strong enough to deserve a dip
Every day the Finder scores a universe of about a hundred large companies on four lenses: trend (above its long-term lines), business quality, strength relative to the market over recent months, and momentum. Only names that clear the composite bar become Qualified — a watchlist of stocks the system would want if they got cheaper. Weakness alone never gets a stock onto this list.
Exactly what happens at gate one — step by step
- At 16:20 the universe refreshes: the Nasdaq-100 list, the day's prices, and fundamentals for every name.
- Each stock is scored out of 100 on the four lenses (July 2026 weights: trend 35, business quality 25, relative strength 20, momentum 20). Trend means the moving averages stacked in order — 20-day above 50-day above 200-day above 50-week — with the price above the 200-day line (revised August 2026); quality means profitability and balance-sheet checks — and a name with incomplete data is excluded, never guessed; relative strength means beating the S&P 500 over the last 63 trading days; momentum means RSI above 50 with no short-term breakdown.
- Score 80 or better → Qualified. The watchlist is capped at 15 names, so the bar rises with the competition.
- Guards apply even to the strong: a stock stretched too far above its 200-day line, up parabolically over three months, or with RSI at overbought extremes is qualified but not buyable — strength, yes; froth, no.
- Strength must be maintained, not achieved once: a qualified name whose averages un-stack, or that closes below its 200-day line, is disqualified again. A dip through the 50-day line alone is tolerated — often that is the buyable dip (it must only be above the 50-day on the day it first qualifies).
- Then — usually — nothing. The name sits in waiting for a pullback, sometimes for weeks. That is the gate's normal, healthy state.
Gate two: Evaluated — it dipped; now, why?
When a qualified name falls a real distance from its recent high, a buy signal forms — and immediately meets the question depth can't answer: why did it drop? The evaluator reads the day's headlines and the market around it. A stock down because the whole market or its sector is down is cheaper. A stock down on its own bad news is damaged — and damage is rejected outright, however deep the discount. "Do not select a stock only because it dropped" is written into the strategy file itself.
Exactly what happens at gate two — step by step
- The trigger: a qualified name closes a real distance below its 20-day high (July 2026: at least 2%). A buy signal forms — but nothing is offered yet.
- Shortly after the engine run, the evaluator takes all of the day's signals as one batch. Every candidate is examined; none skips the queue on depth alone.
- Context first: if the whole market fell hard that day (S&P 500 down 1.5%+) or the stock's sector did (2%+), the drop is context — the good kind of cheap. Neither? Then the suspicion is company-specific.
- Then the news: the day's headlines for the name are read and classified. Guidance cuts, accounting trouble, lawsuits — real damage is rejected outright, whatever the discount.
- Even panic is measured: a healthy oversold reading is acceptable; a collapse-grade one is treated with suspicion, not excitement.
- Every survivor gets a dip-quality score, 0–100, and a one-sentence reason — both written to the ledger. You can read that exact sentence later in the trace, under Why Evaluated.
- Verdicts don't linger: yesterday's yes never outvotes today's no. A name demoted since its last evaluation is out.
Gate three: Selected — worth your attention today
What survives is scored for dip quality, and only the highest scores — at most three a day — reach the approval email. Deeper dips get more capital, inside hard caps: per purchase, per name, and per day, so that even a generous day of signals can't overcommit the book. The rest wait; if their dip holds tomorrow, they're scored again.
Exactly what happens at gate three — step by step
- Selection: dip-quality score of 70 or better (July 2026), and only the top three of the day. Fourth-best waits for tomorrow.
- Two vetoes can still strike: an imminent earnings dateblocks the buy (however good the dip — no coin-flips on announcement night), and a broken market regime blocks everything.
- Sizing follows depth: a 2–4% dip commits 5% of the agent account's available cash, 4–6% commits 7%, deeper commits 10% — inside hard caps per purchase, per name, and at most ~30% of cash across the day's buys combined.
- 16:38 — the Opportunity Brief tells the whole funnel story: Selected, Evaluated, Qualified, each name with its reason.
- 16:40 — the Approval email carries the Selected with their sizes. This is the only actionable moment; everything before it was information.
- You approve → the order executes on the agent book, the fill is captured, a ledger row opens — graded daily from that moment — and the 20-trading-day time-stop starts counting.
Where it buys, and when it lets go
Finder buys execute only on the agent account — the experiment runs on the experimental book. The market regime gates everything: when the tape is broken, no new buys at all. And every dip-buy carries the 20-trading-day time-stop from the Control Tower: a dip thesis that hasn't worked in a month isn't working.
The exact thresholds — dip depth, scores, sizing tiers, caps — live on the strategy card on Home, straight from the rules file in force. What's written here is the shape; what's written there is today's truth.
Read on
Both engines end at the same place: an ask, and your verdict. The glossary → defines every word they use on the way there.